In the world today, collectivist metaphysics are a philosophical juggernaut, with virtually every school of thought, field of study, and religion in the world, including and perhaps especially the “hard sciences”, conceding these metaphysics as a priori, whether they are consciously aware of it or not. Which, they usually are not because…well, who needs philosophy when you’ve got math, right? Numbers beat reason every time.

Hmmm. To that I’d say: numbers are units of infinity, nothing more. So be careful. It’s easy to replace truth with abstraction when the abstraction you’re working with is designed to be rendered an infinite number of ways. Give me infinity to work with, and I can come up with anything…by definition. And thus, for mathematics to be in any way reasonable and relevant on the level of arrant and object reality, we must hem them in by rational consistency. That is, by truth. That is, by understanding what is rationally possible and what is not, and from this, what is actually good and what is actually not. And truth is a function of philosophy. Period.

Anyway…

By the collectivist metaphysical premises which underly practically all subjects it seems, and along with these subjects society at large, the denizens of society seek to eradicate the “illegitimate” and “invalid” moral consequences of an “illegitimate” ethic. Which is to say, of morality, as opposed to legality. And thus the metaphysic in which this ethic is rooted, the Individual (I, the Self) is marked for death, figuratively unto literally, by “the people” demanding that the government nullify moral consequence through the power of Law, which government wields alone, as the One, True Authority.

To put it much more bluntly, people who have conceded the collectivist ideals of all the “truths” upon which a collectivist society is based will appeal to the State to use its giant hammer of coercive monopolistic brut force to pound into a bloody mash the individual freedoms of everyone in response to the unwanted moral consequences brought about by the choices of the evil or irresponsible. In a society ruled by Law, and not morality, everyone is a sinner. Everyone is guilty for the sins of everyone else. And this is because under Law, there are no individuals, and this due to the collectivist metaphysics which imply legal ethics. Man as an individual is insufficient—morally, intellectually, existentially—and thus the failure of some men (criminals) is merely the reflection of the failure of all men; so how can the Law treat those who commit no crime as innocent? All individuals are merely latent criminals, which is why the Law is declared necessary in the first place. The innocents therefore are punished for the crimes of the guilty, and this is how we think justice is done and how humanity is protected. By using the State to destroy the distinction between the good and the evil, the innocent and the guilty, the responsible and the deadbeat, the giver and the taker, the host and the parasite, we wreck the individual at the point of his very metaphyscial reality, and by this we think we can eliminate his curse—his natural ethical failure, due to the choices he makes as an individual. We take guns away from the non-violent; fossil fuels away from good stewards; money away from the generous; tobacco and other “vices” away from the moderate; and force licenses to ply trades upon the honest and compassionate; and so on. We do this thinking we are protecting the innocent public, while all we are really doing is punishing the innocent for being individuals.

It need not be said that this never, ever works in the long run. Appeals to the Law as a panacea for social ills merely enlarges the State, which like a gravity well draws to it every sadist, narcissist, and greed-monger who has the means and intelligence to get there, and heaps exponential misery upon the nation, compounding the very moral atrocities it claims to alleviate. Without a shred of irony this farce continues, day in and day out, election cycle after election cycle, and no one seems to notice. It’s shocking.

To remediate unwanted moral consequences, we, the lemmings of collectivist ideology, appeal to government violence—the use of state force to compel obedience through death and threats of death—to fix and prevent the fallout of poor moral choices…to clean up the messes left by individuals who have committed specific immoral acts. Instead of encouraging better choices through a saturation of society with rational philosophy, we, without a hint of irony, appeal to the monumentally immoral act of using violence to force the innocent to comply with legal regulations which are deemed a collective necessity due to the immoral actions of some. In short, we use the law to burden the innocent for the crimes of the guilty. This is not only irrational, it is an object evil.

As I have said, this will never work because to apply legal solutions to moral problems denies the real and root truth of the individual. The individual is truth, the collective is a lie, metaphysically speaking. Which means, when we are talking about the fundamentals of human existence, the individual is that from which reality flows.

The Law seeks to regulate the choice out of reality by using regulation to compel obedience, which is the antipode of choice with respect to root ethics. But choice is actual reality, because the individual, not the collective, is what is real. The individual is concrete; the collective, abstract. To attempt to subordinate the concrete to the abstract is at best hope over reason. To attempt to solve ethical problems by destroying that by which ethics has any meaning in the first place—namely, the individual—is the mere substitution of soundness for madness. And this only ever multiplies and compounds unwanted ethical consequences. It sews misery among the populace, it doesn’t resolve it. Further, the implimention of an irrational ethic like legality is, itself, patently unethical, because it is immoral. And it shouldn’t have to be said that you cannot solve or prevent immorality by appealing to immorality. Yet, this is precisely what the Law is.

Replacing morality with legality destroys and brings abject misery to humanity for the simple reason that collectivism is a lie by virtue of it being a metaphysical contradiction. That is, it defies reality. And there is no power in the universe which can change reality. This is because power is, itself, real, and therefore can only ever confirm reality. Even if that confirmation comes in the form of a Roman cross, a guillotine, a killing field, a concentration camp, a gulag, mass starvation, or a mushroom cloud.